BOOK IV — THE RETURN OF THE SCRIBE
Thoth, to André
I
André: If Divine Order is intelligible, how can it contain limitation, error, conflict, suffering and evil?
Thoth: It cannot be answered while you use these words as though they named one thing.
André: How should they be distinguished?
Thoth: Limitation belongs to a finite capacity. Error mistakes a relation. Conflict sets powers or aims against one another. Suffering is the experience of injury, deprivation or frustrated relation. Evil is not identical to any one of these.
André: May they occur together?
Thoth: Often. Their conjunction does not erase their difference.
II
André: What, then, makes something evil?
Thoth: A persistent inversion in which power is separated from Wisdom and Love.
André: Must a conscious person intend that inversion?
Thoth: No. Evil can exist as an impersonal power or condition when the inversion has become organised and continues to act.
André: Does personal intention make no difference?
Thoth: It changes responsibility. It does not create the whole nature of the inversion from nothing.
III
André: Is every error the beginning of evil?
Thoth: Error may be corrected as soon as the true relation becomes known.
André: When does it approach inversion?
Thoth: When power protects the error from correction because the false relation serves its continuance.
André: Then ignorance and evil are not the same.
Thoth: No. Ignorance does not yet tell you what a being will do when knowledge becomes available.
IV
André: What is the Good against which inversion is known?
Thoth: The inseparable unity of Power, Knowledge, Love and Presence. Evil can divide their action, but it cannot create the powers it divides.
V
André: What is Providence in relation to evil?
Thoth: Providence preserves the possibility of restoration without having willed the evil. It establishes limits and consequences within which inversion must act, and it works through divine and human causes that resist, correct or repair it.
André: Why does Providence not prevent every inversion before it acts?
Thoth: Manifest causes are real enough to produce consequences. Freedom is real enough to refuse Divine Order. Finite relations are real enough to conflict and fail.
André: Is their reality an explanation of every suffering?
Thoth: It tells you why a world of real causes cannot be treated as a theatre in which only one cause acts. It does not tell you that each wound was necessary.
André: Then mystery must not be used to justify what has not been understood.
Thoth: Nor should an incomplete explanation be offered to the sufferer as though it repaired the loss.
VI
André: What is Providence in relation to suffering that arises from limitation, conflict, accident or loss rather than evil?
Thoth: Providence may limit, heal or restore what suffering damages without having required the damage.
André: May suffering nevertheless become knowledge or strength?
Thoth: A being may transform what it has suffered. The worth of that transformation belongs to the being and the restorative causes, not to the injury as a hidden gift.
André: Then the result does not justify the wound.
Thoth: No future wisdom makes past cruelty wise.
VII
André: How does Providence establish limits upon impersonal evil?
Thoth: Every inversion depends upon relations it did not create and cannot wholly command. It meets the resistance of other powers, the consequences of its own acts and the limits of the order in which it operates.
André: Yet evil may continue for a long time.
Thoth: Duration is not proof that it belongs to the Good. Nor does the promise of eventual consequence release the living from opposing it now.
André: Providence may therefore act through those who refuse the inversion.
Thoth: If you exclude human action from Providence, you make responsibility foreign to Divine Order.
VIII
André: What does knowledge of the Good require of the one who possesses it?
Thoth: That the unity known in contemplation remain present in the act that follows.
André: Is correct understanding insufficient?
Thoth: Knowledge separated from the power to act, love for what is harmed and presence within the consequence has already lost the unity it claims to know.
André: Then contemplation of the Good becomes false when used to avoid the world.
Thoth: Knowledge is judged by the relation it sustains when action becomes necessary.
IX
André: I have questioned you concerning Mind, Word, law, freedom, death and the Good. What remains for the one who returns with this knowledge?
Thoth: To become responsible for the human form in which it enters the world.
André: Is the scribe’s duty simply to disclose everything received?
Thoth: Ask what must be spoken, what must remain silent, and how Wisdom may be transmitted without making the writer its master.
